A blog to share security, networking and cloud related technology information as @vCloudernBeer picked up on his search for his destiny in the cloud. (LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chowanthony)

Friday, December 26, 2014

Blogging is new to me. I started blogging in late July of this
year. To my surprise I was able to deliver 30 blog posts in 30 days.

In
the month of November I have participated in a community effort where
each member publish 30 blogs in 30 days. You can check out other blog
posts with #vDM30in30 on Twitter or go to http://www.virtualdesignmaster.com/page/2/

When
I sign up I thought it was 30 blogs from the whole group. Not until 2
weeks before Nov 1 that I have discovered that it was 30 blog post for
each person. I thought of backing off but then I wanted to push myself
to see how far I can go.

Of the 30 blog
posts, I have dedicated 20 of them to be OpenStack related in which I
look at different parts of this popular open source cloud orchestration
tool. I would like to put all OpenStack related post into one for reference

Thursday, December 11, 2014

I got this t-shirt a few months back and the material of this t-shirt was so nice such that I put it neatly in the draw and had forgotten about it.

It was given to me for free for the Web-Scale Wednesday -An Global Online event where it brought together IT leaders, industry
experts and enterprise customers to share their perspectives and
experiences adopting web-scale IT and bringing it to the enterprise

What is Web-Scale?
According to this article from Gartner's blog, "Web-Scale" is a term that Gartner uses "in an effort to describe all of the things happening at large cloud services
firms such as Google, Amazon, Rackspace, Netflix, Facebook, etc., that
enables them to achieve extreme levels of service delivery as compared
to many of their enterprise counterparts." The article further identifies 6 elements that web scale has:

Industrial data centers,

Web-oriented architectures,

Programmable management,

Agile processes,

A collaborative organization style and

A learning culture.

An interesting note to the word scale that most people will think of scaling in size, Gartner also stated that scale can refer to speed also.

Nutanix on the other hand suggest that a Web Scale Infrastructure has these 5 essential elements:

Hyper-convergence on x86 servers

Intelligence in Software

Distributed Everything

Self-Healing System

API-based Automation and Rich Analytic

Nutanix has this video on "What Is Web-scale IT":

The main idea of a Web Scaled IT infrastructure is to follow how the huge web companies such as Google, Facebook or Netflix build, deploy and manage their data center. Web Scale principle can be applied to enterprise and even SMBs (Small to Medium Business) to provide agility, scaling and better return on investment (RTO) on x86 hardware.

Nutanix

Nutanix is founded in 2009 with its headquarter in San Jose. First product was shipped in 2011.

For detail specification and description of the software, we can visit this page.

The Nutanix Solutions
According to the Nutanix web page: "The Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform is a web-scaleconverged
infrastructure solution that consolidates the compute (server) tier and
the storage tier into a single, integrated appliance.

The Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform integrates high-performance
server resources with enterprise-class storage in a cost-effective 2U
appliance. It eliminates the need for network-based storage
architecture, such as a storage area network (SAN) or network-attached
storage (NAS). The scalability and performance that the world’s largest,
most efficient datacenters enjoy are now available to all enterprises
and government agencies."

From the above paragraph, I believed that "web-scale converged infrastructure" is the most important words that describes Nutanix's solution which is web scale and with a converged infrastructure. Providing to customer the ability to scale like the big web companies such as Google, Facebook or Netflix with a converged infrastructure bringing hypervisor, compute, storage and networking into a single appliance.

All the Nutanix hardware platforms can be "linked" together as a cluster. The key to Nutanix's solution is distribution of operation thus making the infrastructure agile and resilience. .

Here is a "Simple Explanation of How Nutanix Works"

Nutanix Innovations
Nutanix does not have any special hardware, all their innovations are on the software - Nutanix Controller Virtual Machine. At of now there are 3 flavors of virtual machines that are specially tuned to their respective hypervisor platform:

This distributed file system is to provide data efficiency and data protection. To the virtual machine in this web-scale converged infrastructure, the NDFS is a single data store. The data efficiency and protection is abstracted from the user. With this architecture, there is no need to have a separate and dedicated hardware to perform inline deduplication and compression. According to Nutanix website NDFS has the following advantages:

Cluster Management
The other main function of the Nutanix Controller Virtual Machine is the management, coordination and application of the key Nutanix technologies in the cluster. This diagram shows the high level components of a Nutanix cluster

Nutanix has a good document on its technologies - Nutanix Bible. This document is an ongoing updated document provided by Steven Poitaris for the Nutanix product. It has so much detail on a lot of subjects. It has a good description of each of these components and I extra the text from the Nutanix Bible:

Cassandra

Key Role: Distributed metadata store

Description: Cassandra
stores and manages all of the cluster metadata in a distributed ring
like manner based upon a heavily modified Apache Cassandra. The Paxos
algorithm is utilized to enforce strict consistency. This service runs
on every node in the cluster. Cassandra is accessed via an interface
called Medusa.

Zookeeper

Key Role: Cluster configuration manager

Description: Zeus
stores all of the cluster configuration including hosts, IPs, state,
etc. and is based upon Apache Zookeeper. This service runs on three
nodes in the cluster, one of which is elected as a leader. The leader
receives all requests and forwards them to the peers. If the leader
fails to respond a new leader is automatically elected. Zookeeper is
accessed via an interface called Zeus.

Stargate

Key Role: Data I/O manager

Description: Stargate
is responsible for all data management and I/O operations and is the
main interface from the hypervisor (via NFS, iSCSI or SMB). This
service runs on every node in the cluster in order to serve localized
I/O.

Curator

Key Role: Map reduce cluster management and cleanup

Description: Curator
is responsible for managing and distributing tasks throughout the
cluster including disk balancing, proactive scrubbing, and many more
items. Curator runs on every node and is controlled by an elected
Curator Master who is responsible for the task and job delegation.

Prism

Key Role: UI and API

Description: Prism
is the management gateway for component and administrators to configure
and monitor the Nutanix cluster. This includes Ncli, the HTML5 UI and
REST API. Prism runs on every node in the cluster and uses an elected
leader like all components in the cluster.

Genesis

Key Role: Cluster component & service manager

Description:
Genesis is a process which runs on each node and is responsible for any
services interactions (start/stop/etc.) as well as for the initial
configuration. Genesis is a process which runs independently of the
cluster and does not require the cluster to be configured/running. The
only requirement for genesis to be running is that Zookeeper is up and
running. The cluster_init and cluster_status pages are displayed by the
genesis process.

Chronos

Key Role: Job and Task scheduler

Description: Chronos
is responsible for taking the jobs and tasks resulting from a Curator
scan and scheduling/throttling tasks among nodes. Chronos runs on every
node and is controlled by an elected Chronos Master who is responsible
for the task and job delegation and runs on the same node as the Curator
Master.

Cerebro

Key Role: Replication/DR manager

Description: Cerebro
is responsible for the replication and DR capabilities of NDFS. This
includes the scheduling of snapshots, the replication to remote sites,
and the site migration/failover. Cerebro runs on every node in the
Nutanix cluster and all nodes participate in replication to remote
clusters/sites.

Pithos

Key Role: vDisk configuration manager

Description: Pithos is responsible for vDisk (NDFS file) configuration data. Pithos runs on every node and is built on top of Cassandra.

Nutanix Use Cases
Being a web-scale converged infrastructure, Nutanix has the following but not limited to the following use cases:

Thursday, December 4, 2014

Compute,
Network and Storage are the 3 pillars of a data center.Storage had been my weakest point in terms of
knowledge and experience.

Today
I had a great chat with Brian Knudtson (@bknudtson) who is very knowledgeable
in different aspects of the technology field and had opened my mind in the area
of “Hyper-convergence”. In this post, I
am stepping out of my comfort zone again and try to venture into this area and
take a look at this emerging and expanding market.In VMworld 2014, VMware announced a new
product EVO:RAIL which reinforce the
idea that this “Hyperconvergence” market has huge potential in the coming
years.

What is Hyper-Convergence?

In its simplest term, Hyper-Convergence is the integration
of compute, storage and network resource on a box in which virtualization
technologies and X86 hardware platform is use.

For a converged system, compute and storage are put
together into a single device/appliance.As for Hyper-convergence, the hypervisor is added thus making the device
as a mini Data Center.

Being a mini
Data Center, SimpliVity see that Hyper-Convergence or Convergence 3.0
should also deliver backup, Disaster Recovery, WAN Optimization and a
Cloud Gateway.

SimpliVity sees Hyper-Convergence as "Data Center in a Box" and this is how they build their Hyper-Convergence product - OmniCube.

SimpliVity is formed in 2009 with it headquarter based off Massachusetts U.S.A.It mission statement is “Simplify IT”.

To make IT simple, SimpliVity creates its hyperconverged
infrastructure platform, OmniCube, by packaging OmniStack on an x86 platform
that provides hypervisor, compute, storage services and network
switching. OmniCube is a 2U rack mounted appliance. The hypervisor is an integral part of hyperconverged infrastructure and the hypervisor in OmniCube is the VMware's ESXi.

OmniCube

OmniCube is to provide high availability and no single point
of failure with the goal of making IT operations SIMPLE.Besides putting compute, storage, networking
and hypervisor onto a single appliance it is also to deliver enterprise
features such as data protection and performance as well as cloud like
scalability capability with its global federation with other OmniCubes managed
via VMware’s vCenter.

For a complete description of SimpliVity, you can
visit their product page.Recently SimpliVity announced partnership with
Cisco to ship the “OmniStack Integrated
Solution with Cisco UCS”.

OmniStack Integrated Solution with Cisco UCS

In August 25 2014, SimpliVity and Cisco had a press
release announcing this OmniStack and UCS integration. The title of the press release is “New SimpliVity Integrated Solution
with Cisco UCS Delivers The Best of Both Worlds: Cloud Economics With
Enterprise Performance, Protection and Functionality”.

Cloud economics means
enterprise customer can enjoy the pooling of X86 resources and at the same time
enjoy the enterprise level performance, protection and functionality such as
high availability of the data center, data backup and restoration and the
efficient handling of data offered by the SimpliVity OmniStack product.

The initial
integration is to put the OmniStack controller and OmniStack Accelerator Card
on the Cisco UCS C240 M3 Series Rack mount server.Here is the reference architecture of this offering.

In Eric Wright’s
blog post this integration is to be a win-win opportunity for SimpliVity and Cisco
in which SimpliVity can reach into new market segments and Cisco can have more
product offering to existing and/or new customers.

This is the software that runs as a controller on the VMware
ESXi in which it is named as OVC
(OmniStack Virtual Controller).

According to the SimpliVity official website this OmniStack
has 10 patent pending.The function of
OmniStack is to:

Combining the functions of up to 12 different
products.

Abstracts data from its underlying hardware,
shifting the management paradigm from hardware resources to workloads/applications
and providing unparalleled data mobility

Work with the OmniStack Accelerator to perform
inline data deduplication and compression

Provide data protection

Provide WAN Optimization

Act as a cloud gateway

OmniStack
Accelerator

This is the hardware module in every OmniCube appliance that
is used to perform the actual inline compression, deduplication of the
data.This hardware module works
closely with OmniStack Virtual Controller.

The OmniStack Accelerator card is to off load the compute resources so that the CPU cycle can be dedicated to the application and to use this dedicated hardware to dedupe, compress and optimize the data. With this accomplished for the data, OmniStack (controller portion) can take advantage of the optimized data to provide global fabric thus allowing VM and data to be moved from one geographic location to another in a efficient and seamless manner.

According to SimpliVity website, OmniStack Accelerator
handles data in 4K to 8K blocks for any tier of storage media of a system as
well as across different data center or even Amazon Web Services.The main idea is in-line deduplication,
compression and optimization of the data.This is done before the data is written to storage thus reducing IOPS
which translates to better performance.The term “Once and forever”
is used in various places at SimpliVity website to describe the inline data
operation.

This is a screen shot taken from the SimpliVity vCenter
plugin and the deduplication ratio is 123.2:1 and the efficiency ratio is
183:1.

This is an important feature for more efficient operation to
remote office branch office (ROBO), VDI and data protection.The about screen shot is from the SimpliVity
vCenter plugin, it show how the user deduplication and compress ration as well
as how much storage usage in an easy to read user interface.

Global Unified
Management

This innovation is to manage multiple instances of OmniCube
as a single pool of resources.

Besides integrating the ESXi in OmniCube, SimpliVity has a
plugin to VMware’s vCenter providing VM-centric
management and reporting capability.

While having a plugin to vCenter, provides user an easy and
familiar user interface to manage the Hyper-convergence infrastructure there
are additional features that SimpliVity had build on top of this vCenter
interface.

Federation

On the right side of the SimpliVity vCenter console is the
company logo.On the left there is a
button – Federation.OmniCube has built
in technology to “connect” to other OmniCube in the network.This is very use for connecting remote
office, data protection and most of all the ability to scale out.

Policy-based Data Protection

Another feature is the policy-based data protection in which
user can configure the time and interval for data or even VM level backup at remote or DR sites.Due to the in-line data deduplication,
compression and optimization the backup and restoration of data and VM is made
very efficient.

Connection to the cloud

SimpliVity has build-in support to interface with Amazon Web
Service so that data or VM can be backup to the AWS storage. Again since the
data are efficiently deduplicated, compressed and optimized this process is
quite fast which helps user to meet better RPO and RTO.